Vinos launches new online shop from novomind

The new Vinos online shop has arrived. The diversity of Spain’s wine world – including a wealth of wine knowledge about grape varieties, growing regions and winemakers – is ready to be explored at www.vinos.de. Germany’s largest online retailer of wines from the Iberian Peninsula has further expanded its range of functionalities, which will impress not only wine connoisseurs. Even beginners will easily find the matching wines for tapas or fish using the Vinos wine finder.

The relaunch was implemented using a software package from Hamburg-based novomind AG. novomind iSHOP and iPIM form the technological backbone of the new shop, as the integrated shop system and product data management ensure fast loading times and a centralized supply of the shop with up-to-date product information at all times.

In addition to classic wine knowledge about the individual products, the new online shop offers many extras that turn the customer journey into a unique “wine journey”, such as individual background stories about wine, its special features and benefits as well as the winegrowing families. This storytelling is made possible by content objects in novomind iPIM, which can be used to link product properties with texts and images and automatically group products with the same properties into categories. In this way, these content objects are displayed on product details pages. If, for instance, the customer follows a link on the details page to find out details about the Rioja winegrowing region, editorial content on the origin and all available Rioja wines will be displayed. The iSHOP recommendation engine automatically generates suitable product recommendations.

The individual product descriptions are SEO-relevant in their level of detail. While the composition of the pages in the shop, the filling with contents of the details pages and the internal link building are done automatically, the valuable wine knowledge contents are researched and created individually.

“Our online shop takes users on a journey through the world of Spanish wines. In addition to improved performance, the main goal of the relaunch was above all to give users a ‘hands-on’ impression of all the facets of this wine world – with the help of images, storytelling, knowledge and, most importantly, our wines themselves,” says Christopher Maaß, Managing Director of Vinos. “This has quite obviously been achieved; we are actually very satisfied with the user numbers, length of stay and conversion rate.”

The strategy of Vinos’ parent company – Hawesko Holding AG (Hanseatisches Wein und Sekt Kontor) – provides for the creation of a central online platform for all brand shops. This plays a key role in the company’s successful e-commerce strategy:

“Hawesko wants to offer its customers wines at a consistently high level also online. By establishing the new online platform, we have created a ‘showroom’ and ‘sales floor’ across all our brand shops,” says Thorsten Hermelink, CEO of Hawesko. “The software package from no-vomind puts all our individual ideas into practice.”

The relaunch of vinos.de, for which the former Magento system was replaced, marks the beginning of the migration of all Hawesko brand shops to the new online platform. The novomind developers are now working as a joint team with the IT department of Wine Dock GmbH – a shared service company within the Hawesko Group – and the e-commerce departments of the individual brands to individually implement the other brand shops such as Hawesko, Jacques’ Weindepot and Enoteca Enzo on this platform.

The novomind shop system is multi-brand-capable and harmonizes with the article data model of novomind iPIM, which centrally and uniformly maintains product data for all articles and can export them to different shops. This makes it easy to merge different product ranges.

“The relaunch of vinos.de was more than just a technology project,” says Martin Heckenbach, project manager at novomind. “The special content challenges in this multi-faceted wine world and the legal requirements in the food sector played a very important role. Wine lovers are too demanding to accept an off-the-peg shop. At vinos.de we were able to implement everything that makes the difference for this very special target group.”